Iron Codex 2 - The Nightmare Garden (41 page)

I wanted to sob, scream, to kick at the Gate until it fractured, but the destruction all around us put me off. At one time or another, the Gate to the dreaming place had worked. I was missing something.

Be smart, Aoife
, I told myself.
Be an engineer
. The Gate had both a power source and enough power in the aether to transform the dimension around us, but what did it lack? What, if I turned in this schematic in an Academy class, would I get marks off for?

Tesla. It began with him, it ends with him
. Tesla was the connection. Tesla connected the Iron Land with all the others. Controlled the wild energy of the vortex between worlds. Beat back the Storm he’d caused even as he’d opened us up to unimaginable horrors.

He connected worlds, and his Gate needed a connector. Something to close the circuit that arced energy all around the spire, making Casey shriek with each new bolt, even though the offshoot of the coils was harmless.

“Don’t be frightened,” I told her. Maybe if I said it to someone else, I could take my own advice. It wasn’t very far to step into the rain of castoff electrical charge, to stand myself between the two iron bars that made up the main part of the Gate.

“What are you
doing
?” Casey shrieked as the coil amped up to a roar. I felt a spark of life in the machine, just the faintest one. I opened my Weird, hoping it wasn’t the last time I would do so.

This time, though, it didn’t hurt at all. It felt as if I’d always been meant to be here, standing in the center of
the only Gate to reach past Iron, past Thorn, and directly into the dreams of everyone in every world. This wasn’t a machine I was touching. This was the fabric of reality itself. I nudged gently, and I felt the vortex grip me.

Just one more step.

The Dreamer’s Domain

W
HEN
I
STEPPED
into the center of the Gate as it came to life, power humming through its every mechanism and rivet, I felt it close around me. The energy snapped off my skin and sent blue streams of electrical fire arcing toward every corner of the small room. “Don’t worry!” I shouted at Casey, who was plastered against the wall, eyes as wide as they would go. “I’ll be all right!”

Of course, I really had no idea. But I didn’t care. My Weird filled my mind, cool and deep as diving into a bottomless pool.

My vision turned into endless light as the coil arced brighter and brighter. The Gate was too powerful, no longer part of me but a tide pulling me under and replacing what made me Aoife with the unrelenting strength of the Weird.

I spread my arms, embracing the ride, feeling electricity arcing from my fingers, my hair, my eyelids. The violet light
of the aether whirled around me, obscuring the ice tower, obscuring everything.

The falling sensation gripped me, and it was far stronger than the
hexenring
or the Gates in the Mists. This was being pulled into a vortex, not transported from place to place.

Fading, the light bleeding away into blackness, I saw the thousand skies above me again and was frozen for a moment before I felt the breath sucked from my lungs and the stars blinked out, one by one, as I passed into unconsciousness.

I felt something brush across my face. Not a hand. Something more like a feather or a cobweb, light and insubstantial as breath on my cheek.

Opening my eyes was a tremendous effort. Everything about me was heavy, most of all my thoughts, which were moving at the pace of sluggish snails.

Was I lying unconscious somewhere, or dead? Was any of this real?

It was my dream, I realized, but tethered to the painfully real, as every part of my body could attest. Above me, I saw a glass ceiling looking out onto a gentle blue sky studded with a few white clouds, delicate as spun sugar. A wind blew them apart and re-formed them into new shapes. Pink sunset blushed at the edges, and for a moment all I could do was stare through the spiderweb cracks in the glass.

“I like this time of day.”

I rolled my head to the left and saw bare white feet surrounded by the hem of a black robe, moth-eaten and nearly gray from wear.

The figure in black was no longer shadowed and covered by illusion and my own mind’s dream projections. His chest was bare, plain black trousers hidden under the robe, which he shrugged off and let fall to the floor. His hair was slicked back from his face, curls gathering at his neck. His eyes were strange, not silver like a Fae’s but white and ever-changing, like smoke under glass. I couldn’t stop looking at him. The dream figure was one of the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen.

“You’re the first person besides me to see it in a very long time,” he said. “It happens in the winters of the worlds, the same sunset all at once, when things are desperate and broken and on the verge of cataclysm everywhere else.”

The sky darkened to blood-red, blood dried to puce, turned to crumpled blue velvet and then darkness, studded with winking stars. The figure sighed. “And it’s over.”

I swallowed. My throat was tight and sore, as if I’d been screaming for hours. My voice, when I found it, was barely a rasp. “Am I dreaming?”

“No,” the figure said sadly. “You’re awake, Aoife.”

Then I’d made it. The Gate had worked. I felt like screaming for joy and sobbing with relief all at once. “I’m … This isn’t my dream?”

“No. You’re here, in the center of all worlds, the place that is not a place,” the figure said. “The real here. The here that can no longer hide under the veil of sleep.”

“I’ve been here before, though, and thought it was real,” I said as the ticking of the great gear reached my ears. I was still unwilling to believe that after all I’d been through, I’d finally done something right. “I’ve dreamed exactly this a lot of times. Standing here and talking to you.”

“I know, but dreaming you’re here isn’t the same,” said the figure. “People dream their way here sometimes, or at least they used to. They put their images up on that glass there, make this place what they want, not what it is when you actually exist in it or when you come to it through a Gate. Except you. You could see most of what was really here in your dreams, but not all. Part of you still saw what you wanted to.” He gestured at the place. “Does it really look anything like you wanted? Now that you’re standing here with your body and not just a fragment of your mind?”

I swiveled around to take in my surroundings from my vantage on the floor. The floor itself was thick with dust and grit, and covered in the skeletons of small birds and mammals, feathers and bones decaying under my hands and feet, which I could feel with the realism of the waking world. It was as if things had been trapped behind the glass of the dome and never escaped. The throne and the great gear so prominent from my nightmares were in reality dilapidated, the seat propped up under one broken leg by thick cloth-bound books, the regalia flag tattered beyond recognition. It blew back and forth in an invisible wind. Actual cobwebs swam from the ceiling in thick banks like rain clouds. The gear itself was rusty, and it ticked with a sonorous groan each time it moved. The air had changed when I stepped through the Gate, was stale and sour and ancient against my face.

In the light, in reality, it was as far from what I’d expected as a true face was from a blurry photograph. I felt crushing disappointment. This place couldn’t help me. Nothing here was more than a poor imitation of my dreams of setting things right.

“You’re disappointed,” the figure stated, as if he could read my mind. I didn’t deny it.

He sighed, moved away from me, and sat at an ornate dining table hidden in a shadowed corner, large enough to seat twenty. A tarnished candelabra was at his elbow, candle wax flowing across the surface. The single chair wobbled under even his slight weight. “It’s been unseen for a long time,” he said. “I used to have a place across every world, even if it was only in people’s dreams. But when they put gates and guards at all the entrances and exits …” He sighed, his breath kicking up some dust from the tabletop. “Those things are broken now. The dreams have stopped coming.”

I flashed on Dean.
I sleep tight beside you, princess
. Valentina, Cal, my father and even Draven had all made mention that they hadn’t been dreaming.

How could I not have seen it? The broken Gates were fracturing not just all the physical Lands, but the metaphysical one as well. This dream place was drying up. That fact left me with one burning question.

“Why do I still have dreams?”

The figure shrugged, as if the answer should be obvious. “You’re not dreaming when you visit me. You’re touching something you can’t quite grasp. Like the man who built that contraption you used to get here, you can lift the veil, the perceptions put in place by space-time, and you can see the worlds as I see them from here. It’s your gift, both of you.”

“Tesla? Tesla came here?” My voice came out a high squeak, and I felt an impending sense of panic of the worst kind. This was all wrong. My dreams were dreams. Reality was reality. Without that, I might as well be mad.

The figure nodded. “Nikola was a troubled man. A man who thought he was going insane, until his science helped him realize he wasn’t having visions. He had a gift, and where some controlled fire or water or air, he controlled reality itself. His gift was trying to show him what he could do, but unfortunately he never believed that what he’d done was a worthy thing. When he realized that he could use his gift to build those Gates, he thought he’d brought about the end of the world.”

He stood up again as I stared at him slack-jawed, trying to process what he’d just told me, and moved to stand in front of the great gear. The skies outside changed in time with its agonized, rusty ticking, becoming stormy and dark. Lightning arced from place to place, and the ground under my feet vibrated with thunder. I wasn’t scared of what was outside, but I was terrified at the implications of this man’s words.

“He didn’t destroy the world,” I said in a whisper. “The Storm made it a bad place. A hard place. But the Iron Land still exists.” This couldn’t be true. My Weird was machines. It was iron, steam, aether. Gears and wheels, turning in time with my mind.

My Weird was not this, not this power to rend reality. I’d already done enough of that.

But how else to explain how I’d come here? I hadn’t fixed the Gate with my Weird—it hadn’t been broken to begin with. It had come to life at my very presence. Almost as if it had been waiting for me.

I started shaking, and knotted my hands together to hide it. Fixing the Gate in the Bone Sepulchre hadn’t hurt. Not one bit. My Weird usually crushed my brain, compressed
and remade it, every time I tried to use it, but this time … this had felt right. I had to consider that the man from my dreams could be right. Maybe machines weren’t my Weird. Maybe manipulating machines was just a side effect. Maybe, really, Tesla and I were the machines, made of bone and blood and magic rather than iron. Machines able to open the doorways between worlds with our thoughts.

It wouldn’t be the strangest thing I’d heard of since I’d left Lovecraft. I looked back at the dream figure. “Tesla wasn’t afraid of the Gates,” I said. “He made them for a reason—he made them to keep people safe. Maybe what grew up around them was bad, the Fae and all the creatures creeping into the Iron Land, but …” I trailed off, frustrated and confused by the whole conversation. I’d come here to make things better and I’d only found more questions.

“It’s not the Gates Tesla was afraid of,” the figure said. “He was afraid of them.” He pointed out at the storm, which billowed across all the skies now, blanketing us in iron-gray violence and bright white lightning. Rain began, spattering patterns across the glass, and every time the lightning flashed, I caught a glimpse of things with blind eyes and long tentacles, writhing and racing and fighting among the clouds, growing closer and closer with every heartbeat, every boom of thunder. I drew back, even though, exposed inside a glass dome, there was nowhere to hide.

“What are they?” I whispered, feeling my shoulder begin to throb with a vengeance the closer the great creatures came. “Who are
you
?”

“I’m nothing,” the figure said. “I’m everything. Depends on how you look at dreams.” He looked back at me, silhouetted
in the lightning. His face was handsome, not young and not old, taut skin over sharp bones, a hawkish nose and those blind eyes that nevertheless stabbed me with a visceral feeling of vulnerability when he turned them on me.

“I think dreams can be real,” I said softly. “In part.”

“Then if I’m real, and they’re real, at least in part, I’m the one who looks after them,” he said. “The king, the keeper, the weaver and the destroyer. There are a lot of names that spin out all across the skies. Some say I’m a trickster and some that I’m a demon. Depends on who you ask.”

“What should I call you?” I said, unable to stare at the skies outside any longer without giving in to the urge to scream. “You know my name. I need yours.” Names had a lot of power, at least with the sort of people I dealt with. It would make me feel a tiny bit more in control if I could name the dream figure, give the darkness substance.